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ABSTRACT
This essay revisits the language of conquest in metropolitan writings advocating Elizabethan Atlantic expansion. It argues that contrary to the belligerent connotations scholars usually attach to the word conquest, in Elizabethan England it was a term used in a benign and benevolent manner that fit within humanist goals for a noble, peaceful, and long-term relationship with both the people and land of America. By the early seventeenth century, however, this idea of benign conquest was overshadowed by factors such as the example of Spanish conquest in the New World, which tainted the English benign usage, and the transition from theory in the Elizabethan age to practice under the early Stuarts, which showed that the American Natives were not willing to accept English presence on the benevolent terms anticipated by English humanists. Another factor that led to the decline in the language of benign conquest was the formulation of the "conquest doctrine" in the law of nations, which gave the term an exclusively belligerent connotation. Owing to these various factors, by the time the permanent English empire in America was established, the idea of benign conquest no longer had a place in domestic, colonial, or supranational discourse.
Less than a generation ago, historians argued that English claims to territory in North and South America and the Caribbean were established by conquest.1 According to this tradition, England's mode of acquiring Atlantic territory was little different from the numerous conquests with which they had historical experience. These included their own subjugation by the Romans, Anglo-Saxons, and Normans; English "crusader ideology" during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries; and English conquests in Ireland, Wales, and Scotland during the late medieval period. Of living memory and closer in analogy was the Elizabethan conquest of Ireland, which involved men who would later have key roles in early Atlantic activities.2 Also relevant were the methods used by the Spanish in the Atlantic, which were presented to an English audience as worthy of emulation by Richard Eden in his voluminous Decades of the New Worlde (1555).3 Thus, when the English began, to quote Robert Williams, the "Elizabethan Wars for America," various "discourses of conquest" were fresh to mind and just and proper to imitate.4
Recent writers have turned away from the...